Introduction

Social actors are normally responsible for what they say or write, unless they indicate explicitly that they are not because they are reporting another person's words, or saying what they believe another person would say in the same situation. Despite this inherent responsibility, speakers often remain off stage, profiling only their utterance and its conceptual reference on stage. Sometimes, however, they choose to place themselves on stage as well via the explicit mention of a first-person pronoun. For example, a speaker may choose to make a comment in reference to an experience by saying I am exhausted as opposed to This is exhausting. The affective stance profiled in the former expression is explicitly anchored to the speaker, unlike the stance profiled in the latter expression which may be anchored not only to the speaker but also to anyone who is or could be in the same position (Langacker 2008: 78; Langacker 2009: 145).

More specific to our purposes are situations in which speakers assume responsibility for their utterance by highlighting a certain aspect or aspects of their identity. Take the exchange between a father and his daughter in the English example in ( 1).

The main message of the father's utterance is the order tell us what happened. The rest of the utterance contains material not immediately relevant to the main message: namely, the profile of the father as an authority figure who is legally qualified to give the order and who is entitled to receive a response from his daughter. By using the expression legal guardian, the father profiles himself as representing an institutionalized form of authority. Importantly, as the stancetaking stage model in Figure 3.1 demonstrates, he invites his daughter to evaluate the directive (the object or OBJ in our model) from the perspective of himself as her guardian; he instructs her to take the directive seriously because of who he is or what he represents.